The End of Apathy

The hot religion statistical trend of recent decades was the rise of the “Nones” — the people who checked “no religious identity” on the American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS). The Nones numbers leapt from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008.

The So Whats appear to be a growing secular subset. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s Landscape Survey dug in to the Nones to discover that nearly half said they believed “nothing in particular.”

These people are on our side. They’re not religious. But the problem is that they’re not helping us either. They’re apathetic.

And we need them. Think about it, how much easier is it to convince an atheist that religion does damage that is worth caring about than to convince a Christian that god doesn’t exist? We need to get the apathetic ones to care, and that means staying on point about the damage religion does to the world – specifically, the way the intrusion of religion to government and the school system affects them.